LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Man, Rick Pitino’s players are well coached. Four times prior to Saturday, Louisville point guard Peyton Siva had played against the Kentucky Wildcats. Four times, he left the game with a loss and with Cardinals fans reminding him and his teammates about this persistent failure against the opponent they are most desperate to conquer.

And after he finally wins, after enduring all of this, what does Siva say?

“For me, I feel like it’s another game; it’s a big non-conference game,” Siva said Saturday after beating Kentucky 80-77. “For the fans, more so, this is their big game because it’s for bragging rights. It feels good to finally beat them. It feels good to get the fans off your back.”

And why did he say it?

“When I was at Kentucky, I was the same way: It’s a real important game ... for the fans,” Pitino said. “For us, we want to beat Kentucky, but not as much as the fans do.”

This will not be the most important game of the season for the Cardinals, now 12-1 and ranked No. 4 in the polls. As a team with the necessary components to win the NCAA championship, including the experience of coming close enough last season to hang the school’s ninth Final Four banner, the biggest games for Louisville will be played in March, perhaps April.

This was no ordinary game, though. Had the Cardinals not held on Saturday against a furious Kentucky comeback, the result would have defined them right up until the moment they either reached the 2013 Final Four, or failed trying. Louisville had to win this game to remove it as an obstacle that might obstruct its path to a title.

So it mattered plenty, even though there wasn’t a lot of artistry to Louisville’s performance.

Forward Chane Behanan did score 20 points and nail a breathtaking fallaway jumper over 6-11 Kyle Wiltjer, and he did blow a kiss to the crowd after a reverse slam on the break.

“I think that was actually for Rick,” Louisville veteran guard Russ Smith said. “Coach P said something and then turned away, and I think he blew a kiss at him.”

This was a choppy game marked by perilous foul trouble for the Cardinals and terminal inaccuracy from the free-throw line by the Wildcats, who now are 8-4 on the season.

Louisville played brilliantly while Smith struggled to a miserable four-point first half. U of L, in Pitino’s words, lost its “defensive presence” and most of a 17-point second-half lead while Smith surged for 17 late points that essentially saved his team.

Louisville won while hitting only three times from 3-point range, but the Cardinals only tried seven, which is hard to reconcile given that Pitino was such an enthusiastic early adopter of the shot he might have camped out at the front door of the gym where the first arc was painted.

This is likely to be the nature of Louisville’s most competitive games.

The Cardinals are not built to function as an effective man-to-man defensive squad, not with a 5-11 shooting guard (Smith) and a 6-5 power forward (Behanan) as two important regulars. So the Cardinals employ full-court pressure that has a bit of a John Thompson influence—contact the offense so often the refs can’t call all the fouls—with Pitino’s emphasis on reading where the ballhandlers’ panicked passes will be directed.

There are going to be times when quality opponents survive the press, perhaps even punish it, and there might be more when it leads key Louisville players to foul problems.

When Kentucky was digging itself from 51-34 deficit with a 10-0 surge that included a couple of 3-pointers by Wiltjer, Pitino blamed a couple of drastically missed assignments. When the Wildcats cut it all the way to 63-61 with 5:32 left, the issue was more that Siva, Smith and Dieng were dancing along the edge of disqualification.

“What happens to teams that live by the pressure and the denial, and now suddenly you get in foul trouble, it’s like you let all the air out of the balloon. You lose all your intensity,” Pitino said. “That’s what happened to us. We can’t let that happen.”

The Cardinals never let Kentucky recover entirely, though, largely because Pitino’s commitment to live (gloriously) and die (a little) with Smith’s manic style has invigorated an offense that mostly was a drag on last year’s tear through the Big East and NCAA tournaments.

According to Pitino, the 2011-12 Cardinals had the poorest field-goal percentage of any Final Four team in 50 years, but they made 30-of-62 from the field Saturday against a team fielding shot-blockers Nerlens Noel and Willie Cauley-Stein. They combined for five in this game but did not have the dissuasive effect coach John Calipari sought by playing them in tandem.

“We’ve got much more offensive firepower,” Pitino said.

He joked that Smith is able to overcome his questionable decisions and periodic defensive lapses because, “He’s sedated in the asylum for most of the day. We let him out at 4 o’clock, and then he’s got to be back by 8 o’clock. He’s out of his freaking mind, and there’s not a player I’ve enjoyed coaching more than him.”

Smith was not an elite recruit. No one else in the Big East pursued him, even though he played at prep school in Connecticut and was a member of the high-profile New York Gauchos summer program, even though there are four conference members right in his neighborhood. He is now Louisville’s leading scorer, one of the top 25 in Division I.

With center Gorgui Dieng back from a broken wrist and contributing six points, seven rebounds and two blocks in a 20-minute appearance, Pitino allowed that this was the first time in matchups against Calipari’s Kentucky team that Louisville had comparable talent.

“Quite frankly, I thought we had more talent than them because our talent is more experienced,” Pitino said.

The Cardinals know what to do. They know what to say. The day could not have gone more perfectly for Louisville, during the game and after.